Ravitch responds to Gates

Posted
on December 18, 2010, 5:47 pm

A couple of months back, I wrote a post on Diane Ravitch’s negative review in the New York Review of Books of the education documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

At the end of November, though, I missed an interesting short interview in the Washington Post with Ravitch. In the unconventional interview, she answers questions put to her rhetorically by an exasperated “education reformer” named Bill Gates, who was speaking to her through reporter Jonathan Alter at Newsweek.

Here are Gates’ questions (as quoted by Alter):

Does she like the status quo? Is she sticking up for decline? Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts? Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely? If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.